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Sherlock and Cressida

I have a personal (invitation only) blog that I post my dreams on (along with other of my personal life stuff), so I don’t normally post them here. But every now and then I have a dream that is so “out there” that I think might entertain my readers, even via sheer bizarro value, so I post it here for all to read. Last night—at the height of my personal Neptune trine Uranus transit—I had one of those. So here it is.

I was in London, and the first thing I remember about the dream is libraries. Big ones that took up two buildings so that you went in one and came out another on an adjoining street. This seems to be what I had done, anyway, and then I was walking down a crowded pavement. It was late afternoon, and I was thinking I needed to maybe find something to eat and then go back to my hotel. There were a lot of people out—coming out of work, going out for dinner. The part of the city I was in seemed upscale; there were a lot of men in nice suits.

I was walking toward a bridge—London has a lot of them, but this one didn’t look familiar. And I was suddenly aware Sherlock (yes, from the BBC television show) was walking behind me. I went to cross the bridge, but he got ahead of me somehow and I realized something was going on because next thing I knew he was fighting some bad guys. I remember thinking, even while in the dream, it was all rather more James Bond than Sherlock.

But the bad guys caught him. That seemed to have been their goal. And he woke up strapped to one of those metal medical tables in the back of a semi (he would have said “lorry”). He was yelling for them to move him to another room. And somehow I was in the cab of the truck and able to look back through the little window into the cargo, and it occurred to me he must not know he’s on a truck. Couldn’t he feel it moving?

The whole thing ended up being about a little girl named Cressida. She was maybe six or seven years old, had long blonde hair, and she was dying of cancer. And her parents were some kind of fundamentalists and wouldn’t take her to the hospital for treatment, yet somehow they thought Sherlock Holmes would be able to save the girl.

Sherlock took the “if you can’t beat them” tactic. And for whatever reason, I had ended up part of this strange band of people as well. I didn’t seem free to go, so I guess they’d captured me when they’d captured Sherlock.

For a while we moved place to place pretty regularly in order to stay ahead of the law. But the whole thing culminated in us gathering at a kind of huge playschool where others of these people’s “church” also came. Sherlock was remarkably jolly. He did magic tricks and stuff to entertain everyone. Guess he does love an audience. At one point there was a little TV on a shelf, and I think it was actually showing Sherlock. But the signal kept getting a little fuzzy, and this one woman kept going to jiggle the cable. I found that annoying for some reason.

Cressida’s parents were preparing for her to get married . . . Possibly to Sherlock, though I’m not entirely sure of that. But she was in really bad shape, though she was keeping her spirits up. It was clear she wouldn’t live much longer. In one of the playschool rooms they had set up a bunch of sleeping bags and hammocks. All of them cobalt blue. Cressida was in a hammock, in the wedding dress and veil. I was two or three children over in a sleeping bag. Yes, children. There were mostly children there—it was like a child’s party, a sleepover. So I’m not sure why I ended up in the sleeping bag. But the kids were singing . . . It was one of those songs that they’d clearly substituted the words. Some pop tune, but they’d changed the words. And Cressida’s mother came over and was massaging my shoulders, but not in a good way. It was like she was trying to be mean, trying to hurt me. It irritated me. In fact, throughout a lot of the dream I was irritated.

Cressida died that night, I think, and I’m not clear on whether the wedding ever actually happened. I think maybe she took her vows while lying in her hammock. Sherlock was either the groom or the ordinator. Not clear. Don’t think I actually saw it happen in the dream; it was one of those things that took place “off camera.” But the sum total was, the morning after the sleepover, everyone was packing to leave.

There was something complicated about stairs headed down to where our bags were waiting for us. Pale grey concrete and they looped back on themselves in some way. I was walking down with another woman, and there was an athletic coach—also a woman—at the bottom of the stairs. She and the woman I’d been walking with knew each other and greeted each other and then I accidentally brushed up against something, either in a trash bin or that the coach was holding, that had nacho cheese on it. What a mess, more irritation. There was a laboratory of some kind down there, too, so I went and found a sink. And there was candy next to the sink, so I took some. Others who were down there were saying they were hungry, and I was like, “There’s candy. Stop complaining. It’s probably for the rats but I’m taking some anyway.” And everyone laughed. I felt better after that for some reason.

Sherlock was there, too, in the laboratory, and I suppose he was also getting ready to leave. I felt like he was watching me, but I tried to ignore it. I was waiting with my suitcase (though I’m not sure what I and the others were waiting for . . . transportation of some kind, I guess) when I woke up.